Every Cold War, every family or tribal dispute in human history, has been interrupted to bring you a non-aggression pact.
Some have brought the power of salvation. Saving us from ourselves, anyway. Others have been no more valuable than the paper upon which they were written; as flawed as the hands that clasped while fingers were crossed behind corresponding backs.
For the sake of stock car racing in New England, for the future of Oxford Plains Speedway, I pray fervently that this past week’s détente between promoters Tom Mayberry and Tom Curley is one that will go down in history as the undisputed champion of peace accords.
I shall furnish the benefit of my doubt and say that I believe it begins with the best of intentions. Both men are astute enough to recognize that this is the last chance to save an endeavor that thousands of us have known and loved.
But history shows that pride and prejudice have felled a greater number of powerful nation-states than did natural disasters. That, and we know racing produces stranger and more volatile bedfellows than politics and rock ‘n’ roll put together. So I shall proceed with caution worthy of an eight-car pileup blocking the racing groove.
The meat of Thursday’s announcement was peaceful coexistence. Rather than schedule against one another, rather than strong-arm competitors into choosing one side of the electric fence or the other, Mayberry’s Pro All Stars Series and Curley’s American-Canadian Tour have declared their intentions to pull in the same direction.
Each division will showcase a long-distance race on a season-opening card at OPS. And more importantly, after two years of scheduling its own big-money race up against the PASS Oxford 250, ACT has promised not to do so next August.
It’s the latter move that sent shock waves and feelings of elation through the sport. Think of the chill bumps cascading down Chris Matthews’ leg on election nights of yesteryear, times a thousand.
Race fans are fully convinced — because, let’s face it, most race fans can be convinced the moon is made of green cheese, processed by Bob Bahre — that this is the greatest thing to happen in Maine and New England since the discovery of rubber.
And they’re right, if it works out. It is a reasonable assumption that fan and car counts will increase dramatically from last July’s fun, entertaining, action-packed but alarmingly buzz-free 250. Of the 30-plus drivers who cast their lot with Curley, perhaps because they felt there were stronger odds of getting their hands on the big paycheck, many will secure rides that fit the super late model specifications of the 250, bolstering what has been the dominant race in the region since 1974.
So where does my caution flag/reality check come into the picture? I’ve seen this movie a few times, and so have you. The history of the 250 itself is one of myriad sanctioning bodies, border disputes, broken promises and notable names kept on the outside, looking in. For being the “richest short track race in America,” a decades-old promotional one-liner that acquired asterisks long ago, it’s had an agonizing knack for not getting all the cylinders working at once.
There’s usually someone making headlines, at least in gossip columns and on message boards, for choosing to put away his ball and stay home. We’re used to saying, “Wow, that was a great race, but wouldn’t it have been even better if … ?”
You want to take this cease-fire completely at face value, but if you’re a veteran observer of the way things operate in local and regional racing, you cannot. Even in the small sample of Maine racing, where there are way too many pieces of real estate (six) identifying as short tracks for such a stagnant, not-wealthy population, tracks and promoters rarely work together when it comes to synchronizing schedules and rulebooks. It simply isn’t in their DNA.
Curley and Mayberry each have a well-defined track record of making decisions according to their respectively stubborn worldviews. Vermont’s Curley, who grew up in the Auburn area, has espoused the allegedly more cost-friendly late model program since the early 1990s. Mayberry, a former driver who prophesied to me in those days that he wished to run a tour “like Curley” someday, has advanced the gospel of the louder, faster super late models without apology.
Never the twain have met, or even made the effort to live together in relative harmony, until now. And that’s what makes some of us uneasy. The “hell freezes over” and “pigs are flying” jokes were exchanged at a furious pace the other day.
Even Curley’s comment in the short press release, calling the arrangement a “work in progress,” had an ominous undertone. We recognize that this is a marriage of convenience. Tom and Tom are burying the hatchet and putting it back together for the benefit of the kids, essentially.
Rarely does that work out in life, but in this case, it has to. Write it down and remember who told you first: If the Mayberry-Curley Pact doesn’t stop the fighting, and if the two major factions in Northeast racing can’t ultimately function as one, there will be no Oxford Plains Speedway or Oxford 250 by the end of this decade. I suspect the same can be said for Curley’s interests and whomever is being groomed as his someday successor in the Green Mountains.
The economy demands it. The diminished popularity of short track racing, a product of the information age and a younger generation’s more diverse interests, demands it. The pool of talent and spectators is no longer deep enough for two passionate, strong-willed dudes to defile with toxic thinking.
A sport I dearly love and am unable to quit needed this. So why do I still feel this awful pit in my stomach?
Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.
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